No, not that one…
By Joe Cooper
Editor’s note: This story replaces Coop’s Corner this month.
I get a reasonable number of unsolicited press releases. No surprise there. One washed into my inbox right after the Annapolis to Newport Race and the headline grabbed my attention:
Team Allegiant is the first all-women crew to complete the Annapolis to Newport Race.
First All-Women Crew Finishes 2025 Annapolis-Newport Race.
I opened the link and learned about the good yacht Allegiant, a J/42 owned and skippered by one Maryline Bossar. Well, ownership includes her husband, but since he wasn’t aboard for this race we’re giving him a pass. Their finish time was 4 days, 17 hours, 52 seconds. OK, not hair-on-fire for a roughly 475-mile race, 40% of which is negotiating the patchy wind and sketchy currents of Chesapeake Bay, which in this case included some time anchored at the mouth.
Allegiant finished ninth in the PHRF class and 44th out of 71 entries. Maybe not Sailor(s) of the Year award stuff, but not too shabby. Think about how many guys they beat. Turns out 15% of the sailors in the fleet were women. This is a stat roughly equal to the percentage of female sailors in the 2020 Vendee Globe. I spoke with three of the girls via Zoom.
The lead instigator, Maryline has sailed for about four years. She’s French by birth, born on a farm, and while working at Beneteau’s sales and marketing office in Annapolis she wondered why “not all the boats can do these races.” She started asking around about getting on race boats. She knew very little about the breadth and depth of the complexity of a sailing boat compared to the product and wanted to become more conversant. Disappointed with the answers about getting on race boats, she started taking sailing lessons. After leaving Beneteau she worked for a yacht charter and management company, Navagaire, in Annapolis and eventually purchased a Beneteau out of a charter fleet in the BVI and basically taught herself to sail. “It is 45-footer too,” she adds with no irony whatsoever. “I met my husband to be when one of his crew for the 2021 Annapolis to Newport had to withdraw for a family medical issue. It was a champagne race, no one got wet foulies and I thought, (Wait for it) ‘Wow, this is ocean racing? I got this…’ It was, of course, the only race ever like that.”
Allegiant crew at the awards ceremony in Newport
Similarly, the bow girl, Emma Rosenbaum, the nipper at age 26 (I know this, not because I asked how old she is (a no-no even today, I reckon), see below) was a rookie, new to sailing as an activity. How did this boatload of girls (OK, women) find each other in the vast wastes of male-dominated yacht racing? Oh, the usual way, networking and contacts. There’s an enterprise called Herrington Harbor Sailing Association, located roughly 20 road miles south of Annapolis on the western shore of the Chesapeake. HHSA mission statement? Racing, cruising lots of fun, women included.
One day, HHSA members including soon-to-be Allegiant crew Marianna Fleischman asked Maryline (after a regatta they’d done about a year ago now; I smell dark ‘n’ stormies) if her Beneteau could go to Bermuda. “Well, maybe not my Beneteau,” the skipper replied, “but I think we ought to put a women’s team together.”
Well, it turns out there is a woman named Maya Hoffman who is behind a group called Leading the Change. Mission statement, short version: Get more women in sailing, offshore in particular.
Hoffman and crew were entered in the 2023 A2N Race but withdrew. They were not alone, the press of weather ruling the day. Hannah Garbee, navigatrice and sailor since birth, is based in Baltimore and is involved with Downtown Sailing Center, where bow girl Emma works as an instructor…and so on. Basic sailing networking culture. The seed, as they say, was well and firmly planted.
Emma is an escapee from the corporate world, who had never been on a sailboat. On first moving into her apartment, she was out walking and saw boats out sailing. “I immediately felt like I was supposed to do that,” she recalls, “so I took the five-minute walk over to DSS and checked it out.” She sailed every day from then on, leaving her corporate job and becoming a sailing instructor at DSS. After a little time there, she went walkabout – Americans know it as a sabbatical – travelling, working on a farm and a ski resort for instance, then returned to Downtown Sailing Center and continued sailing and continued to talk about boats, including the all-women’s programs, outreach and disabled sailing programs within DSS.
Emma connected with the Allegiant girls when she met Hannah, who is on the Downtown Sailing Center board, by doing the delivery back to Annapolis after the 2024 Annapolis to Bermuda Race. She recently completed her RYA Day Skipper ticket on the Solent, (“Oh man, that was a great experience,” she enthuses) and is really interested in being in/on the ocean. With the rigour exhibited by the examiners in any RYA course, Emma remarks on being held accountable during her examination, and felt that this feature of accountability was a big component of the crew’s success on Allegiant. “In a patient and kind way,” she explains, “but we wanted to push and get there fast.”. Hanna began her journey in The Hot Seat as assistant nipper navigator in the 2022 Annapolis to Bermuda Race on Allegiant when the primary navigator asked for help with the log. Next were the 2023 Marblehead to Halifax Ocean Race and the 2024 Newport Bermuda Race as she built up her knowledge of all things Navigator. A self-confessed Nerd among Nerds, Hannah jumped in with both feet, studying the weather and Gulf Stream and getting comfortable with Expedition and all the related tasks and skills of the offshore navigator.
If one considers the increasing prevalence of boat failures in offshore ocean races of late (MOB death in N2B 2022; two sinkings in the ’24; several failed rudders in the current Transpac; a Ret. in the Halifax Race with rudder post water ingress issues; two MOB in the Port Huron to Mackinac Race; a mate of mine abandoned his boat in the closing stages of the Transatlantic Race due to rudder failure based on impact with something hard; and in late May an electrical fire aboard a boat qualifying for the Bermuda 1-2 that was successfully delt with), looking hard at one’s on-board safety procedures is becoming more important than ever. Granted most of the above happened after Allegiant departed for Newport, but if there’s a crack in the machine, the sea will find it.
Several of the girls are involved with multiple racing programs, so combined with “life” writ large they worked hard to get together and undertake all the required safety protocol drills. Maryline commented that getting all eight of the Allegiant girls together took them away from their other programs.
The Allegiant program was great, but it was not, at that time, adding to the pool of women sailors, merely moving the water around in the bowl. One of the goals of fielding an all-women crew in this race was to get more water into the bowl.
Returning from races on the Bay, they practiced their safety procedures, MOB rescues, rigged and used heavy weather sails, rigged and used the emergency steering, and tested all the systems. Interestingly, they did the MOB drill at night. Keeping track of a white fender in daylight, especially if there’s any seaway is hard enough, so I was intrigued as to how they managed in darkness. Emma tells me they used the fender that was attached to a drogue, but no light. (Crews, take note…) They got plenty of practice using the spotlight and fortunately it was close to a full moon. Everyone got a chance to handle the boat, and Emma graduated Summa cum Laude as the Boat Hook Lady, she remarked with a proud smile.
As to the race itself, they were relieved to finally start. All the pre-race planning and What Ifs were behind them…and for a long time so were many of their competitors. The J/42 is not a high-performance rocket; built for comfort, not particularly for speed. There were a lot of light air – and no air – sections of the race. In particular, after about 40 hours getting down the Bay, as they approached the Bridge and Tunnel complex at the mouth of the bay, the breeze knocked off for the night and they anchored. Emma was (more than the others) anxious to get going, for she had made a promise to herself to have her (26th) birthday at sea. At 2350 they felt breeze, recovered the anchor, and blew/drifted across the exit to the Bay. Emma turned 26, emphasized by Hannah placing a birthday sash over her head. Sailing is the sum of experiences and stories strung together, around boats. This one is a goodie.
Once in the ocean, they played the eastern side of the course, based on very little wind inshore and up the Delmarva coast. The breeze filled in on the right and they were able to push down towards Newport in fair breeze, in the high teens. They managed to avoid being hit by a boat motoring back to the south after retiring from the race but not keeping a lookout.
An extra birthday present for Emma was changing headsails as the breeze was building. On the bow, nice North Atlantic waves breaking over her and her mate, kitted out in full foulies, clipped in under the red deck light, gets this girl jazzed.
The foredeck crew got another workout approaching Newport in breeze, this time with the kite up. Not today’s customary asymmetrical sail – rather an old-style symmetrical kite on a pole. Emma was steering and the crew had been reviewing the drill for gybing when the halyard failed and the kite collapsed into the water in front of them. Hannah and her watch partner sprinted to the bow to gather the kite in as the forehatch opened behind them and Maryline’s finely manicured hands with her offshore nails reached out (I imagine The Addams Family Thing scenes) and started to squirrel the kite. Hannah and partner gybed the pole and kite gear, Emma gybed the boat, Maryline packed the kite and within five minutes, they reckon, the sail was reset on the correct side for the final approach to Castle Hill. Sounds like grace under pressure to me.
Approaching the finish line, Maryline was thinking (to herself; the very definition of seamanship), “OK, what else can go wrong?” They crossed the line and the RC came up on the VHF and welcomed them to Newport. “Oh my God, we did this!!!” Maryline says “Cheers all round, massive excitement and hugs, JOB DONE!!!” I asked what time they finished. Maryline said, “Oh, around 0600” before Hannah corrected her: “0523…Navigator speaking here.”
Maryline muses on the notion they did it, completed the race, because they were well trained and well prepared. They had done all the front-end work. The way they set up the watch system, everyone got to steer, they all got better at all their own jobs and the various other tasks ocean racing draws out of each crew member. As skipper she is proud and happy that every one of the girls got to check the box of what they wanted to get out of the race: Get better at sailboat racing in the ocean.
“It was great to feel humility on the boat,” says Emma. “You will often get on a boat with the need to prove yourself. To have the space on the boat where you can be curious and ask questions was amazing. I was asking questions the whole time because this was my first offshore race. I wanted to make sure I was being diligent and understanding how things operate. Every answer was detailed and thorough and kind. There was none of the dismissive, ‘Why don’t you know this?’ kind of feeling.”
Wrapping up? “Very happy to have done this, and the way we did it,” says Maryline. “Girls, get some sea time. It is not mandatory but at least you can say you have been offshore. Show up for boat work in February when it’s cold. Do your certs, Safety-at-Sea and whatever else you want to learn about, like Hannah with weather and navigation.”
Ladies, thanks so much for putting in the time to talk. Good luck with your next event, of which there are several coming down the track. ■
